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varx/tech
@varx@infosec.exchange
mastodon 4.8.0-alpha.3+glitchBoston-area meat construct ␥ I just do what the plants tell me ␥ I'd rather be undermining the client-server paradigm
This is the more tech-y alt of @varx@cybersecurity.theater
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Joined October 25, 2017
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that cavern thing I'm always nattering about:
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@Canageek@wandering.shop I got rejected because one of the tests came back with a positive, and they re-checked it with a better test which came back negative.
But the false positive means I can no longer donate, period. 🙄
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Other people: "Looks simple enough, let's play!"
Me: [staring into space, trying to visualize a 29-dimensional hypercube]
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I likely won't be answering many questions about information not already in the posts. I'm using my discretion here as an experienced operator to determine which information my employer would consider sensitive—often that's "what does it do" and "what's the scale on that Y axis". I also mostly work with open source software, which makes this somewhat less fraught.
I think it would be cool if other people post their own graphs to this hashtag, but... use your own judgement. Think about what you would feel comfortable sharing in a public bug report against a library.
#GraphMystery
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Here's the first puzzle, a warm-up.
This is a recent heat map of memory usage in an HTTP service. What caused these four prominent "spurs" you see along the top?
(More context, not all necessarily relevant: The service is running in Kubernetes, so the samples represent containers, each container running multiple workers. The Y axis, not shown, starts at zero. Time zone for X axis is unspecified.)
Anything else can you figure out from this graph?
#GraphMystery
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@gaditb@icosahedron.website We got a solution! And I know what mathematical construct these decks match up to now.
I still want to play around a bit more, but this has been a fun romp through algebra.
Great piece on how broken Pangram is: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-is-broken-but (The author says "fragile" but no, it just looks broken to me.)
TL;DR: Pangram gives inconsistent results for different excerpts of the same text, but almost always claims "100%" AI or human authorship for the whole document.
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@GuerillaOntologist@social.coop Oh, I didn't doubt that Starbucks would do something shitty! But thank you, that's a better source indeed (even if it's an aggravating format, but that's 2026 for you, I guess).
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@yosh ehhhh, each of the component services *also* has only one or two nines -- even if you ignore the dodgy aggregation function, it's not a good situation.
Quantum computing is going great:
https://github.com/GiancarloLelli/quantum/pull/1
The code submission that won 1 BTC for using a quantum computer to "crack" small ECC keys works exactly the same if you replace the quantum computer with /dev/urandom.
This isn't about brute-forcing a small key. It's the other way around: The quantum computer was being *used as* an RNG! 😆
Doin' the old job hunt again.
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@jwrm22@hsnl.social @soph@grrl.me Maybe that's what the botlickers meant by "if you're not an early adopter you'll be left behind". 😆
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@gaditb@icosahedron.website After a couple of weeks of collaborating on this, my partner finally got a 55-card deck with 8 symbols per card!
(I think I'm going to hold off on looking at the papers and slides, though. Still some stuff I want to ponder.)
@yama@tech.lgbt @badkeys@infosec.exchange Out of curiosity, what year are you posting from?
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@ben@mastodon.lubar.me @pikesley@mastodon.me.uk just going to do a little light colonization
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@micahflee I'm very amused by all of the Bugcrowd garbage data that ended up in the DHS contractors table.
Who knew that the Fortune 500 company `Phishing
If cannabis is so great, why don't they sell cannater?
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@szbalint@mastodon.social It's an interesting idea, but a few things to consider:
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AC is expending on average, what, ~300W additional energy into the environment? If an AC and a set of awnings kept two identical houses at the same temperature, the AC would be strictly worse.
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Houses exhibit the greenhouse effect. Solar energy that you bounce off the house may be re-radiated into space, while photons that enter the house are almost 100% converted to thermal energy.
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ACs often bring houses below the no-AC ambient temperature, while shutters/awnings merely prevent houses from rising above it.
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@RavenLuni@furry.engineer @MongooseStudios@hachyderm.io It's... potentially non-contradictory.
There is a small subset of devs who can use LLMs without deskilling or producing slop, and requiring people to *not* use AI in interviews might help identify that subset in the candidate pool.
But obviously that further limits the candidate field in a way that's completely counterproductive when you consider the other constraints.
(And yeah, I'm similarly reluctant to apply to any company that wants me to use LLMs.)
@alexjsp@social.lol
Someone put a broken Zen clock out on the curb, and I'm pretty sure I can fix it wit some glue. (The solenoid broke off, probably due to the clock falling off something.)
But I don't love the idea of having to deal with batteries.
It takes 4 C-cell AA batteries. I wonder if I can just... wire the +5V/ground wires of a USB-A cord to the battery compartment contacts?!
@Skabber@hachyderm.io You're looking for a highly skilled person and requiring them to use The Deskilling Engine?
You may need to increase salary to compensate.
I thought it would be simple to test the new USB-based SD card reader I bought, but it ended up being a multifactorial nightmare.
So far I've learned:
- My Thinkpad T520 has flaky USB ports, but the T420 is OK.
- Almost all of my SD and MicroSD cards are corrupted.
- I have exactly one MicroSD card that works at all in both the new and old readers.
And then some mysteries:
- Using the new reader, after using "safely remove", it repowers spontaneously. [EDIT: But doesn't remount, at least.]
- Using an SD adapter, the working MicroSD card mounts read-only in the old reader, and isn't recognized at all in the new reader.
So, does the new reader work? Who fucking knows!
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Just remembered that it's possible to research social skills on the web like you can research technical skills (even though social skills are very hard and technical things are easy).
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@bagder@mastodon.social I recently tried to cross-compile a small Rust program for Mac and discovered that in order to do so, I would have to sign some kind of developer agreement? Nope, don't feel like reading through all that.
I can only imagine what it's like developing for Windows.
Just compiling for Linux for now.
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@gaditb@icosahedron.website Haha, nailed it!
I'm glad to hear there's discussion of it but I'm going to keep bashing my head against this for now.
(I should keep a list of all my failed attempts.)
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@GuerillaOntologist@social.coop Well... at least this site is honest about the text and images being AI-generated. I think I'd want to see some actual sources on this one, though.
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@troyhunt@infosec.exchange Possible typo: In the unsmoothing section, is "6 fast requests" supposed to be "10 fast requests"?
In any case, glad to see you're able to continue expanding what this service offers.
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@nolan@toot.cafe I was rather hoping to make it a bit less nebulous! Regardless of whether I should be impressed or not, I'd still be interested in a prediction if you'd like to make one.
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@nolan@toot.cafe I'm not much into betting, but I wonder if you'd like to make a prediction.
What do you think is the probability that six months from now, you would be able to prompt an LLM to create a program with the following constraints?
- Complexity on the order of IndexedDB
- Not reimplementing something that already exists (I have several reasons for this constraint)
- Accordingly, not driven off of a pre-existing test suite
- High enough quality that you would risk your family's privacy and security on it
- Maintainable code (either by human or further LLMs)
- Takes at most a workday for prompting + manual fixups
- API costs of at most $500
Or, how far out do you think it would be before this seems 90% likely to work?
(Feel free to quibble with any of my constraints. I chose those because that's what it would take to impress me.)
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@gaditb@icosahedron.website Yeah, it was inevitable that we would eventually come to an encoding that would allow representing most/all characters from world languages, unambiguously. The previous situation is untenable.
However, I wonder if you would call the following "a unicode": A container format for text where there is a prefix indicating the character set (and maybe some delimiters, runlength indicators, whatever). A multi-lingual plaintext document would have different parts in different character sets.
Any recommendations on an encrypted location-sharing app for smartphone?
I'm looking for an app appropriate for someone to track the smartphone of a child or an adult in cognitive decline (with their consent!) but that doesn't leak geolocation info to the app provider and their 3672 closest vendors.
So far I've found Paralino, which promises that it is e2e encrypted, but I haven't found an audit or anything. Has this one been audited? Recommendations for alternatives?
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@merill@infosec.exchange Yeah, heard about a few of these campaigns. Also featuring prominently: Gun control (both pro and anti), Israel and Palestine, others of the usual suspects.
I bet it's pretty effective.
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@dancingtreefrog @SecureOwl Yeah, noreply had a blog up for a while with some of the catch, don't know if it's still there.
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@technomancy@hey.hagelb.org For what it's worth, Kagi feels like less of an AI company than even DDG. It doesn't shove AI summaries in your face and the chatbot is entirely opt-in.
But I acknowledge that the guy is at least a little bit sketchy.
(I also currently find the Kagi search results better than Google's.)
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@lattera@bsd.network (FYI this is a slop image -- there are a lot of tells, but the third panel is particularly egregious.)
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@gaditb@icosahedron.website Oh man, this is even more interesting than I thought.
I was pretty sure I had a solution, but I need to trim it down. (Being vague on purpose, will put any potential spoilers under CW.)
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@ysotomayor@mastodon.social Looks like *someone* couldn't get through the day without Al!
@rayckeith@techhub.social
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@haveibeenpwned Just this morning I got a phishing email to my Amtrak-specific email address. So the scammers are already on it. -.-